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You're very welcome.

If I were you I'd apply for reconsideration again with something like this:

"Dear Webspam Team,

Thank you for taking the time to reconsider my site.  I do admit that at one time I offered guest posts from my blog.  However, I have now removed all links from those posts.  I have no intention of ever offering guest posts again.  I have removed the "write for us" section of my site and will now concentrate solely on writing my own posts for the site.

I enjoy writing these articles and participating in the Adsense program.

Thank you once again,

[your name]"

First off, thank you Peter for the recommendations of my articles.

It looks like there are a number of issues with your site. I wouldn't focus so much on just one algorithm, but rather, spend time looking at the entire site and its issues.

What phrases are you trying to rank for? Your title tag on your home page says, "The Community of Web Design Professionals" which I am guessing is not your money keyword. Keywords in the title tag (without stuffing), especially at the front of the tag are very important.

Next, I would get rid of the huge full page popup. It could possibly cause the page layout algo to affect your rankings. It can also cause people to quickly bounce away and look for another site which can be a signal to Google that users don't enjoy your site.

The Google pagespeed insights tool gives you a very low score. Improving on pagespeed could make a significant difference.

You've got 1490 pages in Google's index. Do you really have 1490 high quality pages? Is it possible that there is some content indexed that doesn't need to be? For example, when I take text from this article: http://www.1stwebdesigner.com/find-qualified-designer/ and search for it on quotes on Google I see 27 results. The only pages that you want from your site in Google's index are high quality, unique and compelling articles and resources. With that said, if you wrote this article and other people copied it, I wouldn't be worried. But, if you purposely syndicated it, then it could be an issue.

It's hard to say whether links are the issue. It doesn't seem like any of your drops coincided with a Penguin date so I am guessing that Penguin is not suppressing you. (Can't say for sure without having a deep look). But, it is possible that you were previously getting some benefit from self made links that now, Google can determine are self made as opposed to truly earned and they may be discounting those links. You mentioned that you had created a lot of links on your own. As Google gets better and better at figuring out which links are truly earned as opposed to self made, it may be that you've lost significant pagerank that used to come through these links.

With that said, have you checked Google Search Console --> Search Traffic --> Manual actions to make sure there is no manual action there? I see a lot of blogroll links and sometimes if there has been excessive link exchanging going on a site can get a manual action.

Now, back to the algo stuff. Can you tell via Google analytics if the big drop in May happened on May 20, 2014? If not, it's not Panda. If it is exactly on this date though, then I'd be spending more time looking at on-site issues than links.

Hope that helps!

Marie

Hi Kat,

I found that link by looking at the links from ahrefs.com sorted by anchor text.

You're very welcome.

OK, so if we can see that the drop happened May 20, 2014, then there is a high possibility that Panda has affected your site. We can't always say that with certainty though. I remember the week following that date, I had three separate sites that came to me saying that they had been horribly hit by Panda. One of the sites had done a redesign and launched May 19. The redesign changed all of the title tags and the urls, so it was not Panda's fault that they dropped in rankings. Another site had also redesigned and the developer forgot to put the Google analytics tracking code on the site. So, rankings didn't change but it looked like traffic plummeted. And the final site had accidentally noindexed 90% of their site. I'm not kidding!

Still, a big drop on May 20 (give or take one day) means that there are on-site quality issues to address. While it's never wrong to audit your backlinks I'd spend more time reviewing on page factors. When Panda first came out I spent a lot of time looking at thin and duplicate content. While that stuff, especially thin content is still important, there are a LOT more factors that go into Panda. I firmly believe now that Panda is Google's way of figuring out what users prefer seeing. As such, I focus on three things:

1. Improving technical SEO.

2. Removing or vastly improving thin content. (And yes, redirecting to an appropriate page or category page is fine.)

3. Figuring out how the site can be the best of its kind for users. This involves looking at competitors' sites with a non-biased eye and also looking at analytics data to see if there are pages in the index that users are not happy with (i.e. they consistently bounce or spend very little time on the page compared to others.)

Here is more on my approach to Panda:

https://moz.com/blog/have-we-been-wrong-about-panda-all-along

Best of luck!

Marie

There really is no expiration date on the link equity that goes through a redirect.  If you're worried about penalized links then they will always be present and if you redirect one site to the other then you'll be redirecting all of those links as well.

BeanstalkSEO's solution probably would work.  If you want to be able to redirect the site without having a splash page you can also do it by redirecting through an intermediary page that is blocked by robots.txt.

There are many different kinds and qualities of site audits. I've seen some expensive site audits that were useless. It frustrates me that some SEO companies are producing these expensive audits that are not helpful at all.

There are good tools out there to cover the basics, but a good SEO audit has to go well beyond what a tool can give you.

When I do a site audit it will take me several weeks to complete it. Seriously...weeks. I'll often discover something that seems off and then go down a rabbit trail for a few days investigating that. I'll agree that tools like Moz and SEMRush are awesome. But a good site audit needs an experienced eye in order to be helpful.

I also think that many SEOs overlook overall site quality when doing an audit. I'm not talking about technical quality, but rather, answering the question, "Is my site truly better than the ones that are ranking above me?" I really think that as Google gets better and better at answering a user's query, the only sites that are going to be ranked well are the ones that truly are better sites...not just the ones with the proper h tags, title tags and url structure.

For example, I recently reviewed a site that ranked #1 for years and then dropped to page 3. He was sure that he was being penalized. When I looked at his site I couldn't figure out how to purchase the product he was selling. There was almost no helpful information on product pages. There was only one stock image of the product. As a user, I would be much more likely to purchase from any of the sites on page 1 than from his site. Those sites had beautiful design, buying guides, easy to understand shopping carts, etc.

A tool won't give you that info.

The problem though is that to have an experienced person who has successfully helped sites recover look at your site, it's going to be expensive.

Thanks very much for the recommendation EGOL.

William,  I have seen a lot of photographers that have been affected by Penguin.  With that being said, your backlink profile doesn't look typical of most Penguin hit sites that I see.  The first thing I'd check is whether you have a manual unnatural linking penalty.  This is different than Penguin that is an algorithmic issue and not a manual penalty.

If you've traded links with a lot of other photographers than a manual penalty is possible.  To check go to Webmaster Tools then Search Traffic and then Manual Actions.

If you see "no manual webspam actions found" then that's not it.

I see a lot of sites that go on a link pruning crusade when really their problem has nothing to do with links.  A lot of these sites have issues with the Panda algorithm which really is not a link based algorithm at all, but rather, deals with on site problems.

If you'd like me to have a more detailed look, feel free to contact me via the email on my Moz profile and I can give you a few options.

That sounds like a pretty competitive term.  Once you take away your unnatural links, do you think you have enough truly natural links to support rankings?

If so, here are some other possibilities:

-You could be held back by another algo such as Panda, above the fold or keyword stuffing.

-Perhaps you still have more links to disavow?  Often new ones will keep popping up.  Are you doing monthly disavows?

-Perhaps there are technical site issues that are holding you back?

My guess though is that your previous rankings were based on links that are now considered unnatural.  I wrote a Moz article last year on this type of thing:

http://moz.com/blog/after-penalty-removed-will-traffic-increase

Sounds good.  When it comes to deciding on disavow vs removal, if you have no manual penalty, then my advice is to remove any links you actively control and then disavow the rest.

Here's more info:

searchenginewatch.com/article/2374406/Penguin-Recovery-Should-You-Be-Removing-Links-or-Just-Disavowing

If that is the only line in your robots.txt file then it really shouldn't accomplish anything. It's like saying, "Hey...all search engines...take note of this....oh forget it, there's nothing to see here."

I agree with Dave...try to fetch the page in Webmaster tools (Google Search Console). You can also use the Webmaster Tools robots.txt tester which often will tell you if there are issues.

• Hi this is what we thought but Google has not indexed any pages

How old is the site? It can take weeks for a new site to get indexed and then to get ranked as well. Do you see any pages on a site: search for your domain? (i.e. site:example.com). This might sound silly, but are you sure that there is no noindex tag on the page?

Hi David,

I think Chris has given you some excellent advice. I have a few additional thoughts.

It sounds like you're doing a good job on the link cleanup. It's important to know that Penguin has not refreshed since last fall. If you were suppressed by Penguin, you won't escape that suppression until Google recrawls all of your disavowed links and then refreshes the algorithm again. As such, you may see a significant boost when that happens. We don't know when the next Penguin refresh is but it is likely going to be a few months.

I sleuthed out your site and had a quick look. Your title tag is keyword stuffed and written for search engines not readers.

I know it's not intuitive to do this on a photography site, but try adding a paragraph of text before your big image. The text should contain one or two keywords, but be primarily written for readers again, not keyword stuffed.

When you changed your site, did your urls change? If so, you need to redirect your old urls to the new ones otherwise any links pointing to those will be lost. When I did a site: search for your domain name and scrolled down to the last pages that Google has listed, they all ended up on 404 pages. I'd take those 404 pages and perhaps redirect them to an appropriate category page.

Be patient with webmaster tools. It can sometimes take a few months for links to appear in the list. It doesn't mean that Google is not seeing them though.

Hope that helps! By the way...you have some really awesome photos on the site.

Marie

That's great to hear that you jumped after disavowing. There are some algorithms other than Penguin that consider links as well, so it's possible that these were affecting you. Or...it's possible that for some reason the change was not related to the disavow.

Here's what I did to find those 404 pages:

site:yoursitename.com

Then, scroll to the bottom of the list. If you see "show results with omitted results included", click on that. Then, move to the last page and scroll to the bottom.

Don't worry if you see some results in there that say they are blocked by robots.txt. I don't know why Google shows them on a site: search but it's nothing to worry about. But, click on some of the non-blocked results you see in the list and you'll see that they are on 404 pages.

Now, there's an easier way for you to do this and that is to look in Google Search Console (formerly Webmaster Tools). Click on crawl and crawl errors and you'll be able to see the 404 pages that Google has recognized.

Regarding redirects, I see that you have Yoast's SEO plugin installed. If you click on the advanced option for each page, you'll see a line where you can choose to redirect each page or post to another. The other way to do this is via htaccess. There are lots of resources online for how to edit your htaccess file to implement a redirect. But really, I think that for what you are doing, the Yoast option would be the easiest.

Hope that helps!

OK. So for that particular page, it looks like you've redirected it to itself. I have a plugin that shows me the redirects and I see:

"..../blog/2013/01/liverpool-wedding-photography-rebecca-david/

301: Permanent redirect to ..../blog/2013/01/liverpool-wedding-photography-rebecca-david/

At the bottom of that particular post, in the Yoast Advanced settings you should see a box that allows you to choose which page to 301 redirect this to. Perhaps an appropriate page to redirect to would be the weddings category page (/wedding-gallery)?

I should mention though that there is a good chance that these 404 errors are not a huge deal. Google will eventually figure out that these pages are gone and will remove them from the index. Having 404 pages is not going to cause you any sort of penalty. But, in general, it is better for users if they don't consistently land on 404 pages. I wouldn't get too worried about these and spend a lot of time on them though.

Glad you found the culprit. I was going to mention that this was probably it. If Googlebot sees noindex anywhere on the page it can cause the whole page to be deindexed. Sometimes it's really tricky to find as well.